Kamil Ali

our custody.” Dr. Barrett stared into Saana’s eyes. “The hospital must ascertain your mental condition before releasing you.” “How long will you keep me?” She sighed in defeat.
“That depends on Dr. Kulwant, our Chief Psychiatrist.” She tapped her pen on Dr. Kulwant’s name at the top of the report. “He makes the final decision.”
The doctor left the room after a few minutes of silence. Tears burned Saana’s eyes before rolling down her cheeks. Her mother dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
Two attendants arrived and wheeled Saana’s bed through the security door of the Suicide Ward. Her mom followed. One of the attendants handed Dr. Barrett’s report to the nurse on duty.
The attendants helped Saana to a chair. Her mom sat on the chair beside her. The nurse picked up the phone at her desk and called the hospital security to open the door. The attendants exited with the rolling bed.
After checking Saana into her room and removing all items that could aid suicide, the nurse asked her to always leave the door ajar. The bars on the windows shocked Saana into hopelessness and loss of privacy. The hospital had imprisoned her like a criminal!
Stress from her ordeal and mood altering medication sent her into a deep sleep. She awoke several times in panic, when the reality of her situation invaded her sleep.
Saana obeyed every rule and attended every therapeutic session. She had to be on her best behavior to trigger an early discharge.
She showered and wore a clean hospital gown for her mom’s arrival. Visiting hours had just started. With no mirrors, she used her reflection in the window to groom herself.
Her heart leapt to her throat when she spotted a red-eyed frowning girl with white messy hair framing her bloodless face. She stood about ten feet behind Saana. A dirt-stained raggedy doll dangled by one arm from the little girl’s small fingers close to her bruised knee. Both wrists had bandages.
Saana swung around in an instant. The girl had vanished. She glanced at the window. The angry little girl stared at her. The girl’s entire eyeballs turned dark-red, causing the hairs on the back of Saana’s neck to stand on end.
With a suppressed yelp, Saana scampered out of the room. Trying to make herself inconspicuous to the hidden cameras she’d noticed upon her arrival, she used long strides on wobbly legs to escape the child-ghost in her room.
She ducked around the ‘L’-shaped corner of the hallway and dived into the nearest vacant room. She flipped the lights off and closed the door with a soft click.
Panting to catch her breath, she stood behind the door and leaned over, to scan the hallway through the room’s upper wall of clear glass.
A move on the glass switched her focus from the hall to the glass. Her blood turned cold. The little girl glared at her from the back of the room!
Saana flung the door open and sprinted toward the nurse’s station. When she rounded the corner, her mother and the nurse stared at her with curious expressions. She slowed her pace to a casual walk and smiled at them while using every ounce of willpower to slow her breathing.
“Where were you?” Her mother searched her eyes for clues.
“I went for a speed-walk.” Saana drew the outline of a square on her palms to indicate the shape of the continuous hallway.
“That’s good, Saana.” The nurse bought her story. “Exercise is good for the mind and body.”
On their way to Saana’s room, she glanced behind several times. Her mom’s presence gave her comfort. Upon entering the room, she refused to glance at the window. She had no desire to be branded as crazy for seeing a ghost-girl.
She asked her mom if the hospital had mentioned a release date. She broke into silent sobs when her mom shook her head. One more night in that haunted cage could send her over the edge of sanity.
At the end of the visit, Saana walked her mom to the door to stand with the other parents and await the opening of the door. After hugs, kisses and tears, the parents waved goodbye. The lights came on to brighten the ward, as darkness approached.
The other patients returned to their respective rooms, leaving Saana vulnerable for an attack by the little girl in the hallway and too scared to enter her room. She took a deep breath and lifted heavy legs for a slow approach to her room. Without glancing into the room, she reached behind the doorjamb and flicked the light-switch on.
With lowered vision, she dived under the bedcovers with the door wide open and the lights on. She pushed her head under the pillow to muffle sounds that echoed in the silence of night. Whenever she heard a noise, she pressed the pillow harder against her face.
The next morning, the medical staff rushed to her bed. Floating above the buzz of activities, Saana gasped in bewilderment when they lifted the covers and pillow. The little girl’s lifeless body had started to stiffen in death on her bed with the rag-doll clutched in her hand!
“Prepare her for the morgue.” Dr. Kulwant instructed his staff. “I’ll go prepare the medical conclusion and death certificate.”
Saana followed Dr. Kulwant back to his office. She read over his shoulder as he reviewed his previous notes and added updates.
The doctor’s report pieced together and outlined the life-history of ten-year-old Saana, whose malnourished body resembled that of a six-year-old. She never knew her birth parents. Her father had disappeared when he’d found out about her mom’s pregnancy. Her mother had carried Saana to the third semester of pregnancy before a judge incarcerated her on drug charges. Upon birth, the State placed Saana in foster-care.
Mental and physical abuse by her foster-parents forced the birth of a nameless adult split-personality, who appeared whenever the need for grown up action arose, like the night she slaughtered both foster-parents. She had grabbed Saana and slit her wrists. Saana screamed in pain and cursed at her. Saana’s alter-ego called the cops and vanished.
Prompt attendance by the EMS saved her from bleeding to death. Her foster parents had died from their multiple stab-wounds.
As the child, Saana blamed the adult for the murders and the attempted murder on her life. As the adult, she could not explain her fingerprints on the knives and the blood spatters that covered the entire front of her body.
The doctor’s death certificate ruled Saana’s death as an act of suicide.
The doctor concluded that Saana’s tendency to switch between extreme personalities of adult and child, together with the creation of an imaginary birth mother, placed her in the category of paranoid-schizophrenia with multi personality disorder.
Shaana released the shackles of Earthly existence and soared into the afterlife.

By Romeo Kaseram
Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on August 11, 1905, one of seven children to parents Eustace Mais, a druggist, and mother Anna, a school teacher. His parents were devout Christians, grounding the young Roger and his siblings firmly in religion and in the study of the King James Bible. Mais was educated at Calabar High School, where he was exposed to the English classics. Growing up in a well-to-do family, being educated and his mind opened up by the classics, Mais was at the same time exposed to the Afro-Jamaican peasantry. It was through this exposure where he learned the Creole language, its rituals, songs, folk tales, and its many proverbs.
Mais worked in various roles throughout his life as a photographer, a painter, a playwright, a journalist, and a publisher. As a journalist and writer, he found himself drawn into the growing tide of Caribbean nationalist politics during the 1930s and 1940s. Such was his growing passion for social justice he was swept into Jamaica’s political current as a Fabian socialist. He later joined the People’s National Party under Norman W. Manley.
It was a controversial piece of political writing that took Mais into deeper, nationalistic waters, writing back as he did to the Empire and finding himself in legal conflict with colonial England. As a writer for Public Opinion, the PNP’s weekly publication, in championing the nationalist cause, Mais wrote what is now the well-known article, ‘Now We Know’. It was published on July 11, 1944, and was a denunciation of British imperialism and the insistence by Winston Churchill that the participation by the colonies in World War II would not affect Britain's imperial policy.
It was an article that attacked directly Churchill’s vow to continue maintaining colonial rule following World War II. Mais wrote: “Now we know why the draft of the New Constitution has not been published before. The authors of that particular piece of hypocrisy and deception are the little men who are hopping like mad all over the British Empire implementing the real official policy, implicit in the statements made by the Prime Minister [Churchill] from time to time. That man of brave speeches has told the world again and again that he does not intend the old order to change; that he does not mean to yield an inch in concessions to any one, least of all to people in the Colonies. Time and again he has avowed in open Parliament that, in so many words, what we are fighting for is that England might retain her exclusive prerogative to the conquest and enslavement of other nations and she will not brook competition in that field from anyone.”
The article found its way into the hands of postal censors when Mais mailed several copies overseas to friends and foreign newspapers. His subsequent arrest was based on the evidence of these letters, and he was charged with seditious libel against the British and Jamaican government, and Churchill. He was also charged for breaching the Defence Regulations, which among other things, claimed the article tried to “unlawfully influence public opinion in a manner likely to be prejudicial to the conduct of the war”. Mais was sentenced to prison for six months, and Public Opinion was fined 200 pounds.
It is this period, particularly the time spent in the poor conditions of prison, that became instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a study of working-class life in 1940s Kingston. Inspired by C.L.R. James’ novel, Minty Alley, and written in the style of a narrative, Mais shaped this novel to reflect the realism of daily and public life in a tenement setting, depicting slum life and poverty of the Jamaican working class. Also written out of Mais’ experience of colonial oppression were two other novels, Brother Man (1954), and Black Lightning (1955). Brother Man, with its first-time and sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafarian movement, was also an exploration of Kingston’s slums, portraying daily conditions of Jamaican indigence and impoverishment. Black Lightning features an artist living in the countryside and evidences Mais’ early religious upbringing, exploring biblical tropes of vanity and blindness and its tragic outcome in a blacksmith carving a statue of Samson out of mahogany.
Taken together, these three novels are among Mais’ most significant literary achievements, and grew out of the experiences of the 1930s alongside his social and political awakening and activism as a Jamaican nationalist. These novels remain true to the emergence of nationalism reflected in Caribbean fiction of the 1940s, with its engagement of the local, a concern for community, and with sympathetic focus on the lives of the underprivileged and impoverished majority. Also evident in its writings are the use of dialect, and its imaginative exploration of Jamaican folk culture, which Mais was exposed to as a young boy growing up in Kingston in the 1920s.
Among his other publications are the short story collections, Face and Other Stories (1942), And Most of All Man (1942), and numerous other stories appearing in the publications Public Opinion and Focus. A posthumous collection, Listen, the Wind and Other Stories, was published in 1986, edited by Dr. Kenneth Ramchand.
The play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, and focused on the politician and martyr of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. This play was a significant contributor to the rehabilitation of the character Gordon, who in conventional colonial history was described as a rebel and traitor. However, on the centenary of the rebellion, Gordon was declared a Jamaican National Hero.
Mais’ other published plays include The Potter's Field, and The First Sacrifice. Altogether, he wrote more than 30 stage and radio plays, with Masks and Paper Hats, and Hurricane, performed in 1943, along with Atlanta in Calydon in 1950.
Mais left Jamaica and traveled to England in 1952, where he lived in London. This was followed by a period of time spent in Paris, and then in the south of France. As an artist he showcased his works at an exhibition in Paris using the alias of Kingsley Croft. Some of his artwork were used on the covers of his novels.
He returned to Jamaica in 1955 after falling ill with cancer, dying on June 21 that year at the age of 50. He was posthumously awarded the Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica in 1968. For his role in the development of political and cultural nationalism, he was posthumously awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.

(Sources for this exploration are Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History; Freedom of Press in the time of War and Imperialism: The Trial of Roger Mais and Public Opinion in Jamaica, Conference Papers – International Communication Association, 2011 Annual Meeting; Wikipedia; and encyclopedia.com.)

(Sources for this exploration were Britannica, Wikipedia, The Independent, and Caribbean Literary Review.)

Trinidad & Tobago >